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About ElizaChat

Preventive mental fitness for everyone

Everyone should be able to care for their mental health before it becomes a crisis, with safe, personal support whenever they need it.

Our mission

Make mental fitness a normal part of everyday life.

It’s more than sleep, nutrition and movement. It also means learning to name your emotions, reframe challenges and build mindsets that help you grow.

We pair those daily practices with supportive conversations and evidence-based tools, so people can build resilience, ease stress and feel well for the long run.

Our approach

Mental fitness comes from steady practice across many parts of life.

NUE, our daily mental fitness app, brings that practice into one place that’s there whenever you need it.

Meet NUE
Our vision

People care for their mental health before a crisis.

We picture a world where people care for their mental health the same way they care for their physical health. Daily mental fitness becomes as normal as exercise or a good night’s sleep, so people build resilience before hard times hit.

Support should be easy to reach, personal and responsible. With daily habits, emotional literacy and guidance that adapts to each person, we want to reduce stigma, help people help themselves and build healthier communities for generations to come.

Where our name comes from

In 1966, Joseph Weizenbaum built ELIZA at MIT. It was one of the first chatbots. Its best-known script played a therapist and mostly repeated people’s words back to them, and people confided in it anyway. His own secretary asked him to leave the room so she could talk to it alone.

Weizenbaum spent years afterward warning how easily people trust a machine. ElizaChat takes its name from ELIZA.

  1. Men are all alike.
  2. IN WHAT WAY
  3. They’re always bugging us about something or other.
  4. CAN YOU THINK OF A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE
  5. Well, my boyfriend made me come here.
  6. YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE
From Weizenbaum’s 1966 paper on ELIZA. ELIZA’s lines are in capitals.

Our founders

  • Dave Barney

    Dave Barney

    CEO and Co-founder

    Dave has built software with machine learning at its core since the late 1990s, including more than ten years at Google as an engineer and product manager. He then served as CTO of Kanopy and several startups before co-founding ElizaChat in 2023.

    LinkedIn
  • Luke Olson

    Luke Olson

    Co-founder

    Luke came to mental fitness through prevention: the mind deserves the same daily training we give the body. Before co-founding ElizaChat in 2023, he led sales teams at Via and Aktify after several years in enterprise sales at Podium.

    LinkedIn
Clinical oversight

Clinical Advisory Board

Our Clinical Advisory Board brings together experts in psychology, school mental health and addiction recovery. They make sure what we build is clinically sound and actually helps.

Meet the board
  • Jenna McGinnisLicensed Psychologist
  • David T. MorganClinical Psychologist
  • Todd OlsonCounselor
  • Kimberly ApplewhiteLicensed Clinical Psychologist

Bring NUE to your team

Start with a pilot and see how your team uses it.

See how a pilot works Or download NUE for yourself